Family Law

Monday, January 28, 2013

Texas woman's execution will be the first women executed in the United States since 2010.

Saw this article in the Star. The story of her impending death isn't really the shocking part of this story it is the ridiculously absurd and heinous crime she is convicted of. The story goes,

"Evidence showed McCarthy phoned Booth to borrow a cup of sugar, then
attacked Booth when she went to retrieve it. Booth was stabbed with a
butcher knife, beaten with a large candle holder and robbed of a diamond
wedding ring. "(McCarthy) quite literally took the woman, put her
left hand on a chopping block of the kitchen and then used a knife to
sever her ring finger while she was still alive," said Greg Davis, the
former Dallas County assistant district attorney who prosecuted
McCarthy. "She took the ring from the finger that had been severed and
continued the attack until she finally killed her."

Then they found her later having pawned the ring and using the money to purchase crack/cocaine.

A Texas woman convicted of the gruesome slaying and robbery of
her neighbor, a retired 71-year-old college psychology professor, is set
to be the first woman put to death in the United States since 2010.
A
Dallas County jury already found former nursing home therapist Kimberly
McCarthy guilty of the 1997 killing when evidence at the punishment
phase of her trial tied her to two similar murders a decade earlier.

"Once
the jury heard about those other two, we were certainly in a deep
hole," recalled McCarthy's lead trial attorney, Doug Parks. Jurors
decided McCarthy should die.

Her execution, set for Tuesday
evening, would be the first since a Virginia inmate, Teresa Lewis,
became the 12th woman put to death since the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976
allowed capital punishment to resume. In that same time, 1,309 men have
been executed. Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics compiled from
1980 through 2008 show women make up about 10 percent of homicide
offenders nationwide. According to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, 3,146
people were on the nation's death rows as of last Oct. 1, and only 63 - 2
percent - were women.

The 51-year-old McCarthy also would be the
first woman executed in Texas in more than eight years and the fourth
overall in the state, which executes the most people in the nation - 492
prisoners since capital punishment resumed 30 years ago. McCarthy,
who is black, was condemned for the July 1997 killing of neighbor
Dorothy Booth in Lancaster, about 15 miles south of Dallas. All but one
of McCarthy's jurors were white. McCarthy exhausted her court
appeals, as the U.S. Supreme Court three weeks ago declined to review
her case and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles last week turned
down a clemency petition. On Friday, her attorneys asked Dallas County
District Attorney Craig Watkins to delay the lethal injection, citing
his interest in Texas adopting a law to allow death-row prisoners to
base appeals on race. Watkins has not responded.

"It certainly
doesn't make me happy," Parks said. "It's a fact of life. ... The
reality is, with some exceptions, they're going to execute your client."

Evidence
showed McCarthy phoned Booth to borrow a cup of sugar, then attacked
Booth when she went to retrieve it. Booth was stabbed with a butcher
knife, beaten with a large candle holder and robbed of a diamond wedding
ring.

"(McCarthy) quite literally took the woman, put her left
hand on a chopping block of the kitchen and then used a knife to sever
her ring finger while she was still alive," said Greg Davis, the former
Dallas County assistant district attorney who prosecuted McCarthy. "She
took the ring from the finger that had been severed and continued the
attack until she finally killed her."

Prosecutors showed McCarthy
stole Booth's Mercedes and drove to Dallas, pawned the ring for $200 and
then went to a crack house to buy some cocaine. Evidence also showed
she used Booth's credit cards at a liquor store and was carrying Booth's
driver's license. Booth's DNA was found on a 10-inch butcher
knife recovered from McCarthy's home. McCarthy was arrested after police
found her name on a pawn shop receipt for the ring. McCarthy blamed the crime on two drug dealers she identified only as "Kilo" and "J.C."

"We could never turn up anything that would indicate they existed," Parks said.

McCarthy
was tried twice for Booth's slaying, most recently in 2002. Her first
conviction in 1998 was thrown out three years later by the Texas Court
of Criminal Appeals, which ruled police violated her rights by using a
statement she made to them after asking for a lawyer. Prosecutors
presented DNA and fingerprint evidence that tied McCarthy to similar
slayings of two other women in Dallas in December 1988. Maggie Harding,
81, was beaten with a meat tenderizer and stabbed. Jettie Lucas, 85, was
beaten with both sides of a claw hammer and stabbed. McCarthy was
indicted but not tried for those slayings. She denied any involvement. "When the jury saw the other two were equally gruesome, I think it sealed the deal for her," Davis said. McCarthy
is a former wife of Aaron Michaels, founder of the New Black Panther
Party, and he testified on her behalf. They had separated before Booth's
slaying.

McCarthy declined to speak with reporters as her
execution date neared. She's one of 10 women on death row in Texas but
the only one with an execution date. In 1998, Karla Faye Tucker,
38, became the first woman executed in Texas since the Civil War for a
robbery in Houston where two people were killed with a pickax. Two years
later, a 62-year-old great-grandmother, Betty Lou Beets, received
lethal injection for the slaying of her fifth husband in northeast Texas
to collect insurance and pension benefits. And in 2004, Frances Newton,
40, was executed for the 1987 slayings of her husband and two children
in Houston. At least eight male Texas prisoners have executions scheduled in the coming months.

Subscribe To

The choice of a lawyer is an important decision and should not be based solely upon advertisements. Past results afford no guarantee of future results. Every case is different and must be judged on its own merits.